NCAA Tournament TV

Thursday/Friday Starting at 9:15 a.m., 4 games each on Ch. 8, TBS, TNT and truTV

Steve Fisher was asked if North Carolina State reminded him of anyone the Aztecs have played this season.

Fisher paused.

He paused some more.

“That’s a good question,” he said.

The Aztecs and Wolfpack both wear red. Both exceeded preseason expectations. Both have short benches. Both will be loaded next season, SDSU with three transfers and three incoming freshmen, N.C. State with three McDonald’s all-Americans. Both beat Elon University. Both have a long-armed junior forward named DeShawn.

And that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Sixth-seeded SDSU and its small-ball lineup have not faced — and here’s where it gets scary for Aztecs faithful — what they will Friday in Columbus, Ohio, in their opening game of the NCAA Tournament.

“This is a pound-it-inside team,” SDSU associate head coach Brian Dutcher said. “If you’re asking what they’re going to do, they’re going to pound it in on us.”

Added 6-foot-7 senior Tim Shelton, the lone Aztecs “big” man who starts: “If I was a coach going up against us and I had their players, I’d obviously want to throw the ball inside.”

The Mountain West prepares you for many things, for altitude, for wild climactic swings, for travel delays, for consistently inconsistent officiating, for barnburner games in front of hostile crowds. One thing it didn’t this year, though, is the 6-8, 250-pound behemoth backing you under the basket, wedging you out of position for a defensive rebound, leaning on you, smothering you, punking you.

Fisher inserted 6-5 Jamaal Franklin into the starting lineup in place of 6-11 Garrett Green for the conference season because Franklin was emerging as an offensive force, and also because he could.

Other than New Mexico and 6-9 Drew Gordon, this was a conference devoid of legit bigs.

A few teams start a traditional (if undersized) post, but nearly all the power forwards, or 4-men, are what coaches call “stretch 4s,” meaning they drift to the perimeter instead of playing with their back to the basket.

North Carolina State coach Mark Gottfried regularly uses only seven players, but three of them are 6-8 Richard Howell, 6-8 C.J. Leslie and 6-9 DeShawn Painter.

“They’ve got three big guys who are not just tall, but they’re big and strong and good,” Fisher said. “I worry a little bit about that.”

And it’s not just the forwards. All five starters average double-figure points, and four do their best work close to the basket, including 6-5 point guard Lorenzo Brown. Little surprise, then, that the Wolfpack has outscored opposing teams in the paint over seven straight games, including the controversial 69-67 loss to a taller North Carolina squad in the ACC Tournament semifinals.

Even worse news: The Wolfpack (22-12) is playing its best basketball of the season, steadily improving after a shaky start against the nation’s 26th-toughest schedule and closing with four straight wins — all must-haves if it hoped to make the tournament — before some curious officiating down the stretch against UNC.

“We’re going to win, fellows,” Gottfried, in his first season, told his jubilant players after they were the final team announced in Sunday’s selection show.

“We’re going to win, we’re going to win. We can go to the Final Four. I believe it with all my heart. We’re playing as well as anybody in the nation right now, as anybody in the country.

“Usually,” Fisher said, “when you see an ACC team against a Mountain West team, they’re a 6 seed and we’re the 11.”

Brown is a big-time point guard. Scott Wood is the ACC’s most accurate three-point marksman at 41.1 percent and the Wolfpack is 15-1 when he has 12 or more points. C.J. Williams is a lockdown defender at 6-5, 224. Howell is an absolutely load inside. And Leslie, a former McDonald’s all-American now in his sophomore season, was considered by some the ACC’s best player over the second half of the season.

“The fastest big man I’ve ever seen,” Brown said of Leslie, who is averaging 19.2 points, 10.5 rebound and shooting 62.2 percent in the last eight games. “There’s not much you can do with him.”

If James Rahon recovers from the flu bug that had him sit out practice Tuesday and Fisher goes with his usual four-guard lineup, Franklin likely would draw Leslie. But someone will have to guard the smaller, quicker Franklin at the other end.

So who blinks first?

“We’ll be harder to guard with a smaller lineup, and they’ll be harder to guard with a bigger lineup,” Fisher said. “It becomes a question of who says, ‘We have to go bigger, or we have to go smaller?’”